Container gardening - III : oak leaf lettuce

This attractive, oak-leaf lettuce - deep green leaves (darker than they look in this photograph) tinged with red - grows so slowly that I now understand why they are expensive in the supermarket. I read on one web site that slugs (of which I have too many in my garden) don't like oak leaf lettuce but I have not yet tested this theory, which would be wonderful if true.

Meet the chooks - I

This is how a hen looks when she thinks you have concealed about your person a dish of something delicious made with oats and raisins, half a banana and (to counter "sour crop") probiotic yoghurt. It is late afternoon, which is why her crop is already quite full, giving her a one-sided bosomy appearance.

Container gardening: II - more "pommes"

These are the Vivaldi potatoes that I am "chitting" (encouraging to sprout) before planting in a dustbin. I am about two months late for main crop in England but I hope to be able to harvest something by the winter.

Below is the "wordle" generated from the text of yesterday's blog post. (More about wordles at the Caroline Miscellany blog.) I am enchanted by the automagical way it has created a Gerard Manley Hopkinesque title for that entry and in a fish shaped word-cloud. You can make your own word-clouds here.

Morning larvae pond

After church this morning, walked part of the way home through Greenwich Park to give the dog a run. This is the boating pond, on which during the summer months there are blue and red pedalos for hire. The water really is that lime green, now, having become - as it does every year - a veritable soup of insect larvae. I know people who come here in the early morning with fine-weave shrimping nets to collect the larvae to feed their pet fish.

The tall sundial in the middle of the photo, on the other side of the pond, is located on the prime meridian, longitude 0 ^o.

Container gardening: I - the Golden Apples of the Hesperides

The "Gardener's Delight" tomatoes have started to set fruit on the lowest spray of flowers (bottom right of the picture).

Some say that the Golden Apples of the Hesperides were love apples (tomato), some say they were peaches or quince, and yet others believe that they were oranges or lemons. In the Eleventh Labour of Hercules, he was ordered by Eurystheus (king of Mycenae) to steal golden apples from the garden of the goddesses of evening and sunset, the Hesperides.

Races on the River Thames

At the Pilot Inn this afternoon, for a meeting held in the beer garden. The Pilot Inn was established in 1801 and somehow survived intact, with the adjacent terrace of houses, while all around it on the Greenwich Peninsula shops and pubs and dwelling houses were demolished during the 1990s and modern blocks of flats and the Dome built. The pub sign depicts a Thames sailing barge, a type of flat-bottomed vessel which was a common sight on the River Thames in London in the 19th century. The annual Thames barge race on the lower Thames takes place tomorrow, 12 July 2008.

The Pilot Inn is a great place from which to see something of the London Red Bull Air Race, on 2 and 3 August 2008, without having to buy a ticket to watch from one of the three main viewing areas. The race involves navigating lightweight and agile single seater aeroplanes at speeds of up to 250mph/400kmph through an aerial slalom of 20m high inflated pylons erected on pontoon barges. There are pictures of the 2007 Race on the BBC web site.

The noise made by the planes is incredible: neeeee-ow, neeeee-ow, neeeee-ow, all blimmin day. There is no escape from the deafening neeee-ow anywhere near the river in Greenwich. I might go out of Greenwich for those two days or buy a pair of ear plugs. Last year, I happened to be in Greenwich market at the time of one of the races, and people were cursing, and one man shook his fist at the plane looping above us and shouted something unprintable.

Hen husbandry

This is the first time that I have wormed my two hens. Take one box of red grapes (from Egypt, found reduced in price at Sainsbury's), select six and cut them in half. Dip the cut side of two halves into the Flubenvet powder and knock off the surplus powder. Give one half to each hen. Repeat every day for a week. (The other grapes cut in half are just to treat the hens: they love grapes, especially red grapes.)

Everything I know about poultry-keeping I have learned from the friendly on-line forum on the Omlet web site.